Club Cooee is Microsoft’s BizSpark ‘Startup of the day’. Microsoft sees tons of startups each day so it is a great honour for us to be chosen as the most promising startup. Here the interview we gave the Microsoft startup team:
How do you feel being the most promising ‘company of the day’ per Microsoft?
It’s a great honour to be chosen by Microsoft and the fantastic team there working with start ups.
What did you do before creating your company?
The founders Ingo Frick and Alexander Jorias both developed internationally successful 3D computer games for over 15 years. They also ran their own game development studio together and eventually sold it to a publisher, before they started Club Cooee together with two of their main developers. I joined the company after being a partner at a venture capital investor for 7 years.
How did you get the idea? What s the genesis?
The basic idea of Club Cooee was to enhance the successful messenger concept with a “physical” appearance of the people communicating with each other and provide “space” for creation and interaction.
What do you sell? What is your company’s mission?
Club Cooee is next generation messaging, adding a visual, emotional, personal experience as well as all kind of rich media to normal chatting. It combines the key benefits of the successful messenger concept with those of a easy to use virtual 3D world with certain community functions in one small application (<3 MB). It runs seamless and “always on” on top of the users “home base”: his desktop. Our business model is to sell virtual goods.
What is your market?
Casual chatters as well as virtual world users.
Funding history? VCs? BA?
The initial seed investment came from the founders. Later on the company raised a series A round of funding from Aurelia Private Equity, a German Venture Capital company I used to work for.
Growth? Internationalization?
Club Cooee was designed for internationalization from the very start. With localized versions in German and English we already have users from over a hundred countries.
How many employees do you have? How many developers?
Club Cooee has 9 employees. 5 of them are developers.
Are you hiring? If yes, what? Where?
We are always looking for great people to help realize the Club Cooee vision.
Which platform are you building on? Why?
The Club Cooee client was developed for Windows OS. We chose this platform for its easy accessibility of 3D graphics and its worldwide market share. On the server we sue a LAMP stack for the webservices and Java for all liveservices.
Who’s your role model?
We are trying to learn from several other successful entrepreneurs.
Where do you see opportunities today in the Software/internet areas?
Besides the Club Cooee vision 😉 we consider video and mobile applications being interesting growth areas.
Looking for funding? If yes, how much?
Yes, for our internationalization in particular the US we are looking for a US investor with a good network
What about the BizSpark Program? What do you think? Are you going to join? Why?
We already joined the program because we consider it a great help for start ups.
Any advice to young Software entrepreneurs?
Be quick and keep on shaping your product and business model.